THE THIRD FOLD The Idealist Humbug

Since Michael Sprinker is so committed to a scientific analysis of empirical evidence and facts that even before seeing my evidence (let alone analyzing it) he is “quite certain” that my evidence is biased—planted in my passive mind by people who, he is (again) “absolutely certain," have no “political principles”—I have tried in this text to use the immanence of his own texts and activities as my “source” without any references to “others." Thus, in analyzing the evidence of Michael Sprinker's “rightward” practices, I have focused, so far, on the text of his “Letter to the Editor” in College Literature (February 1995) and on his editorial practices at Cambridge University Press, specifically discussing the politics of post-al epistemology in one of the texts he has edited. (In addition, in my essay in College Literature (October 1994), I engaged another text he had edited at Verso—Public Access by Michael Berube.)

In this part of my text, I will narrow my distance even further and focus entirely on his own writings. His writings are, presumably, not fabrications of politically unprincipled people with biased views. It is not that Sprinker cannot discredit this evidence too—he has, in fact, already put the appropriate machinery in place through his editorial work (The Public Access, Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock) to denounce all interpretations that do not conform with his own literal interests, dismissing them as distorting interpretations caused by the closure of reading. In other words, he is already prepared to reject as misinterpretations all “conclusions” that do not affirm his practices. I have, therefore, picked a published text so that those who read my reading of it and his discrediting of my reading as a closural misinterpretation can examine the public evidence themselves.

I read his text symptomatically. It is only by relation to history that ultimately revolutionary/counterrevolutionary practices are measured and the complicity with the ruling class and struggle for communism are determined. At the core of the question (his question) about “facts” and “evidence” is the dialectics of history (Engels, Anti-Dühring; Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks), thus, I read a text by Sprinker in which he offers a succinct summary of his theory of history. This text shows, among other things, that his notion of social struggle is a pragmatic complicity with the ruling class and that “facts” and “evidence” for him, as I have already said, are simply constructs of his epistemological cynicism and eclecticism. By “facts” he really means discursive “events” (Foucault) and regards them to be aleatory happenings with their own autonomy—not objective historical realities that have an existence outside the consciousness of the subject and are determined by necessity, not by the alea.

I read a recent text here, his essay, “The War Against Theory” (The Minnesota Review, n.s. 39; 1992/93: 103-21), so it is not subject to his favorite logic “I have changed my mind—that is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all." I am, of course, not demanding that he should not change (people change all the time), but I am asking what is the logic of these changes. Sprinker, like everyone else, changes, but, and this is the main point in these contestations, the changes in his practices follow a pattern that I have called “rightward” moving. The specific and, by now, predictable trajectory of these changes are aimed at more and more accommodation of the ruling class and its economic interests.

In this essay Sprinker opportunistically defends theory—elsewhere, he is equally passionate about a populism that regards theory to be an elitist practice. His idea of history is underwritten by a rightwing theory of history as the autonomous movement of ideas articulated through the consciousness of the intelligentsia of the time in institutional discourses. His view of history, in other words, eclectically combines traditional bourgeois historiography (history as the outcome of the consciousness of “great” men and women), Foucauldian views (institutionalism) and the Derridean primacy of language. He concocts, in short, a view of history fit for the ludic knowledge industry.

His position on history and historical transformation is thus affiliated with such other reactionary theorists of the ruling class as Paul de Man who also regarded history to be the intra-discursive “matter” of speech acts: “more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence” (de Man, The Resistance to Theory, emphasis added, 11). Sprinker allegorizes the idea of history through a discussion of the history of contemporary theory—the way in which “theory” circulates in contemporary discourses and institutions.

"The discourse of theory itself," Sprinker says, (echoing de Man) “was deeply fissured” and “something called poststructuralism was... already contained within the structuralist controversy itself" (107). “Theory” in other words, is not a superstructural articulation of the movement of forces of production (Sprinker, following De Man rejects the economic) but the effect of an immanent transhistorical force (like de Man's “literariness” or Jameson's notion of “the seeds of time” or Baudrillard's idea of codes of simulation). In Sprinker's idea of history, all social processes/practices are autonomous and differential and not determined by the “outside” of labor relations and the social division of labor: they are autogenetic and follow their own laws of signification—in an inward Vico-esque spiral movement, theory begets theory. In this theory of history, the laws of motion of capital have no bearing on social phenomena such as theory since structuralism begets poststructuralism (which, extending his logic, begets new historicism which begets cultural studies....). Each new mode of theory is “inside” and independent from the “outside” of the working of the mode of production.

Following a Foucauldian idealist historiography and a journalistic regime of truth (as in such similar bourgeois accounts of the history of theory as Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism From the Thirties to the Eighties), Sprinker treats the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and other social struggles as Barthesian “reality effects”: textual events that give his narrative more verisimiliarity and rhetorical believability. To the extent that there is any “analysis” of these “social struggles” and of “history” in his “reading” of the emergence of anti-theory, it is a familiar story rooted in “identity politics” and the cult of experience, an account that produces a profoundly anti-Marxist narrative of contemporary history as superstructural practices.

The politically disastrous and “rightward” consequences of this idealist view of history and of the formation of anti-theory as mere “vogue" become very clear as soon as Sprinker actually offers an analysis of the “war against theory." Anti-theory, according to him, is basically a creation of the “minds” of editors and theorists and not part of the contradictions of the social relations of production and the forces of production. For example, the reason why The New York Review of Books or the London Times Literary Supplement are anti-theoretical, Sprinker says in all seriousness, is because Robert Silverman, Barbara Epstein and Ferdinand Mount “were educated prior to the late 60's or early 70's." "Their literary culture," Sprinker remarks, “was largely determined by the hegemony of the New Criticism and a Trillingesque, Eliotic, or Leavisite humanism” (107). Thus, “ideas” (those of Trilling, Eliot, Leavis) generate more “ideas” (those of Silverman, Epstein, Mount) and determine the history of theory/anti-theory. But Eliot, Leavis, Trilling... were petit bourgeois theorists who simply responded to a historical necessity: the necessity to produce (moral) concepts to ethically justify the older social relations of production of monopoly capitalism that had lost their material and historical relevance under the pressure of new forces of production. But Sprinker, like all idealist historiographers, treats them as autonomous, powerful thinkers whose ideas surge in the world because of who they are: thinkers. And what they “think” in turn brings about more “thinkers” who.... In Sprinker's idealist narrative, it is the “consciousness” of individual thinkers, writers, critics and editors that produces social practices—such as anti-theory—and not, as Marx has argued, the other way around: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1981, 21).

Anti-Theory is, of course, not simply the outcome of the eccentricity of Silverman, Epstein, Mount,... who are influenced by Eliot.... Anti-Theory is the site in which a intraclass struggle has been conducted by those who have directly benefited from the “long boom” (the increase of the rate of profit in the shift of productive relations) and those who have not. It is the site for an adjustment of the social relations of production to the forces of production. Contrary to Sprinker, bourgeois theory itself is not, as I have argued elsewhere, a place of progressive discourses but a new pedagogical site for training a post-al labor force that needs a much more substantive understanding of abstractions, whose mastery has become necessary for running an efficient industry (M. Zavarzadeh, “Post-ality: (Dis)simulations of Cybercapitalism” Book 2, Transformation 2).

My goal here is not, of course, a full analysis of Sprinker's notion of history—for that and also for an analysis of the idea of history in another book he has published in the Verso series, Secular Vocations, by Bruce Robbins, who further reifies this view of history which is then used for the training of an efficient transnational labor force in the New World Order ("A theory is exactly like a box of tools," Deleuze), see my essay in Transformation 2. My aim in this fold in the letter is to outline the trajectory of “evidence” for his “rightward” move from his own writings.

It is by focusing on the “mind” of the authors/critics/editors as the dynamics of history that Sprinker is able to distract attention from the forces of production that in fact determine history and produce the superstructural practices of theory and anti-theory. He is here quietly rejecting Marx and Engels's view (The German Ideology) that "... not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history..." (as basically an “essentializing” ?) view of history.

Displacing the Marxist theory of history, allows Sprinker (among other things) to more “naturally” defend the economic interests of the Routledge-Verso cartel—in his view of the war of ideas as the dynamics of history, economics is placed on the margins. One would be hard put to find a more lucid example of the role of petit bourgeois academics in action: putting aside all pretense to scholarship, epistemology, politics.... and violently defending the economic interests of transnational cartels. Sprinker undertakes his marginalization of the economic through a revisionist definition of cartel and monopoly capitalism—a lesson taught to the Western academics years ago by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (Monopoly Capital 1966). Sprinker proposes that since “Routledge” and “Verso” are “completely separate” companies they are not (by his) re-definition, part of what I—the “other” with my “supposed knowledge” of Lenin, my “imprecise” understanding of economics, my biased evidence and passive mind “foolishly” called cartels in a “blunder." The “other," as Sprinker's “Letter to the Editor” shows from the beginning to the end, is always a “foolish blunderer." But now the “other” wants to end this text (for the time being) by teaching the Boss that in monopoly capitalism the enterprises that are part of the amalgamations that constitute a “cartel” never lose their production and commercial independence. Cartels, in fact, (unlike “syndicates," “trusts” and “holding companies") are very fragile—because of their independence, violent conflicts often occur among them. The only requirements for forming and staying in a cartel is that the members implicitly agree (through what Sprinker, in his supreme act of naturalizing brutal economic practices, calls “friendly competition") to maintain prices in a certain range. It is not necessary for one to have access to behind closed door negotiations and “friendly” understandings, nor is it a requirement that one believes in “empiricism” to see that indeed Routledge and Verso prices follow a certain pattern and stay within an “empirically verifiable” range. The “material evidence” is on the covers of the books they publish: the prices are “facts” of their “collusion” (which Sprinker naturalizes by his “phrase”—"friendly competition"). The fact that Routledge and Verso are “independent," therefore, does not prove that they are not part of a cartel. Quite the contrary, they show that they are part of a cartel by the way they control the market through non-competing lists of publications, by keeping their prices in a certain range, and by having, as Lenin observes, an “international agreement” that binds the “home market” with the “foreign market” in order to provide entry into foreign markets for each other—just as (according to Sprinker's own “Letter") Routledge provides it for Verso in North America. Routledge and Verso, like members of any cartel, have different “spheres of influence” in publishing. That is what cartels are for.

ad utrumque paratus